Al Jazeera America, the US arm of a media conglomerate run by the ruling family of Qatar, called out Alabama on Monday for teaching abstinence-only education in public schools.
Al Jazeera pointed to CDC data showing that Alabama’s STD rates are among the highest in the country as evidence that teaching abstinence as the only fail-proof way to avoid STDs and pregnancy before marriage does not work.
The media outlet reported that public schools are required to discuss health topics with students, including “bullying, hygiene, substance abuse and HIV,” but local school systems maintain control over how those topics are addressed.
“School systems can decide how specific they want to get when it comes to a sensitive subject like sex ed,” Michael Sibley, the director of communications for the Alabama Department of Education, told Al Jazeera. “If a school system sees that there is a need, they have the sovereignty and the authority to make that choice. Those [school systems] that don’t feel that way, where it’s not as much of an issue for the children in that community and they take issue with that kind of curriculum, they don’t have to do that.”
Al Jazeera also criticized Alabama for maintaining “offensive” health education guidelines that discourage homosexuality.
A spokesperson for the Alabama Alliance for Healthy Youth told Al Jazeera the sex education curriculum in Alabama should not make students feel bad for anything they have done. “Education should not make young people cry,” she said.
The report criticizing Alabama may be surprising coming from Al Jazeera, whose parent company is based in Qatar, where homosexuality is an imprisonable offense. Qatari law also discriminates against women, including a provision that states that rape within marriage cannot be a crime.
In one Qatari village they were “proud” of “honor killing” a girl and her boyfriend, who had impregnated her out of wedlock. Qatar Living explains:
Five armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at dawn, just as 21-year-old, 22-week pregnant Sunita was drying her face on a towel.
They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her sleeping boyfriend ‘Jassa’, 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said. When he woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and strangled.
Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside Sunita’s father’s house for all to see, a sign that the family’s “honor” had been restored by her cold-blooded murder.
Al Jazeera has also faced criticism for being a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood in various parts of the Middle East and for producing “anti-Israel propaganda.” CNN claimed the American arm of the network was “sometimes determined to paint the U.S. in a negative light.”
The former head of Al Jazeera America’s documentary division sued the network earlier this year, “claiming it is biased against non-Arabs and women in stories that it produces and in how it treats employees,” according to The Guardian.
“As ratings failed to live up to the expectations of management, Al Jazeera openly decided to abandon all pretense of neutrality in favor of putting the Arabic viewpoint front and center, openly demanding that programs be aired that criticized countries such as America, Israel and Egypt,” Shannon High-Bassalik’s lawsuit stated.
In addition to all of that, Al Jazeera also purchased Al Gore’s far-left television network Current TV.
In short, it is difficult to come to a conclusion about what exactly is Al Jazeera America’s agenda. All we know for certain is that, on Monday, it was taking Alabama to task for teaching abstinence in schools.
